Kashmir

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT KASHMIR - PAGE 5

The battlefront in Kashmir was strewn with bodies Thursday, military officials said, in fighting that shows no sign of stopping despite last week's pledge by Pakistan's prime minister to withdraw Islamic fighters. India said it seized a ridge controlling the supply route through the Mushkoh Valley and another two peaks soaring to 16,000 feet in the Himalayas. Despite almost daily claims of advances, India has been unable to say how much territory is still controlled by rival fighters or how long it would take to evict them.

Police in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Wednesday killed the leader of a rebel suicide squad that has launched attacks on key installations. Salauddin, who used one name, was killed during a fierce gun battle, officials said. He was a regional commander of a Pakistan-based rebel group. Salauddin, 26, was killed when rebels fired at police in Poru Nowgam, provoking a gun battle, police said. Salauddin's biggest strike in recent months was a gun and grenade attack Jan. 16 on the airport in Srinagar.

In recent days, India and Pakistan have stepped back from the brink of war. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf banned five terrorist groups, including two blamed for a recent attack on the parliament in New Delhi, and arrested thousands of militants. India praised Musharraf's Jan. 12 speech to his nation as "pathbreaking," and indicated it would be willing to resume talks with Islamabad if he follows up with concrete actions. Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived Wednesday in the region in the hope of bringing about a de-escalation.

Militias sponsored by the government are violating human rights as they fight Muslim separatists in Jammu-Kashmir state, an international human rights group charged Sunday. The New York-based Human Rights Watch-Asia said state-sponsored militias are committing "grave human rights abuses," including summary executions, torture and illegal detention in the only Muslim-majority state in Hindu India. The group said soldiers have intensified efforts to fight the rebels before Kashmiris elect representatives to the Indian parliament later this month.

Pakistan anti-aircraft guns and artillery pounded an Indian highway in Kashmir Monday night with some of the most intense fire in eight weeks--shelling that came even though the two nations had agreed to stop shooting while Islamic fighters withdraw. The firing began shortly after 10 p.m. along a 6-mile stretch of winding road where Pakistani gun positions are only a few hundred yards away. Earlier Monday, the two months of fighting--which reportedly claimed 1,000 lives--had appeared to be winding down, easing fears of a wider war between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

India's most prominent Hindu nationalist politician carried the nation's flag into the central square of Kashmir's capital on Sunday in a defiant gesture of Indian domination of the rebellious, predominantly Muslim region. Explosions and gunfire echoed through Srinagar's streets, which were filled with tens of thousands of police and soldiers sent to protect the Hindu leader, Murli Manohar Joshi. For two years, militant Kashmiri separatists have waged a full-scale guerrilla war to drive Indian troops and officials from Kashmir, a war that has cost the lives of thousands of civilians, guerrillas and members of the security forces.

Alighting swiftly from a smoky windowed mini-bus on the edge of a small park in central Islamabad, the man blamed by India for orchestrating the 2001 suicide attack against India's Parliament seemed anxious to avoid attracting too much attention. Hafiz Saeed, founder of the outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba organization and a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad, had come to town to address a gathering to mourn the death of a militant fighter killed in Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they won independence from Britain in 1947. Two were fought over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. And now that both nations have joined the club of nuclear nations, their continued disputes make them the world's most likely candidates for nuclear war. But on Tuesday, even as the two armies of the two nations were lobbing artillery shells at each other in the latest round of rising tensions over Kashmir, they were engaged in another form of combat half a world away.

Amid a surge of violence in Kashmir, a car bombing and ensuing gun battle killed three suspected Islamic militants and two Indian soldiers Saturday at the offices of state-run radio and television. Hours later, at least 10 others were injured in two separate attacks in Kashmir, including an apparent attempt to assassinate the state's finance minister. Two Pakistan-based Islamic rebel groups claimed responsibility for the car bombing. One militant was killed in the Srinigar blast and the other two were shot and killed by security forces in the gun battle that followed, a police official said.

Suspected Islamic militants triggered a land mine on a highway in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Saturday, killing eight soldiers and four civilians, and wounding 24 other people, police said. Separate rebel violence left eight others dead, police said. The killings and a deadly attack on an army barracks Friday came after a lull of several weeks in fighting over Kashmir. The 13-year insurgency has killed 61,000 people. The land mine blew up when a bus and truck passed over it on a busy road about 45 miles south of Srinagar, a police officialsaid.